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Went live Monday with the release of iTunes 10.5.1.

The short version is you pay your $25 and upload all your music to the cloud, 25K tracks maximum. The long version is Apple scans your library, and if a track is already in iTunes, they use that track instead. In my case, I got ~10K matches out of 16K tracks, so less than half my library was actually uploaded.

Here's the interesting part. If you need to download a matched track, you get a 256 kbps AAC file no matter the quality of the original file. Again, in my case it replaces thousands of 128 kbps and lower mp3 files. The new files are DRM-free, so they will play on players like Winamp with no trouble.

If you have a large library like mine, be prepared for a LONG wait before iTunes finishes processing and uploading. Took ~24 hours before it was finally done.

The caveat is you have to install iTunes to use the service, but now my music collection finally has an off-site home. I'm sold. Anyone else using it or looking into it?

I'm looking forward to this, haven't played around with it all yet. I love the over the air synching for my iPod now though.

My iCloud sync just finished. Since I only keep a few albums at a time on my iPhone and iPad, I'm really liking this.

Hopefully they'll add Match for movies sometime soon, because I'd really like to be able to grab movies for the kid while we're on vacation without having to carry the entire library on an external drive.

What I'd like is an option to buy missing tracks for the albums I already have if the majority of the tracks are matched and replaced with iTunes versions.

First thing I need to do is go back and check why one or two tracks on an album aren't matched when all the rest are.

I've done all I can to make sure all my music is correctly tagged against both the Musicbrainz and Gracenote daabases. Now I've started the process of downloading all of the upgraded tracks.

But there's a snag.

Out of 4000 tracks downloaded so far, I've hit on about 2 dozen or so that showed up corrupted. Deleting and redownloading hasn't worked. That copy is also corrupt. I've hit on a smart playlist that will detect if a downloaded file is corrupt. Bit rate = 256 kbps, Media kind = Music, Kind contains MPEG, iCloud status = matched. A file pending download from the cloud will be in that playlist, then disappear once the download is complete if it's a good file. If the track stays in this playlist, it's corrupt.

You really saved my skin with this ifnormaiton. Thanks!

I think I'm going to go ahead and give this a shot. I'm sitting at work, wanting to listen to music I have at home, and would really like a way to listen without having to bring yet another device (my iPod in this case) with me. Since I have an iPhone that is always with me this seems like a good way to go.

Definitely going to use the smart playlist DarkAudit posted.